Milagros Cerdeira pours a rose for Mary Kurisko of Nanuet at By the Bottle Wine Shop in Nanuet. / Elizabeth Orozco/The Journal News

Written by

Deven Black and Jill Rovitzky Black

For The Journal News

If you go

By The Bottle, 218 Main St., Nanuet. 845-624-9463.

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The most important thing to know about By The Bottle in Nanuet is that 75 percent of the wines it offers come from Portugal.

Don't know much about Portuguese wine? Owner Milagros Cerdeira will guide you. If you have the time, she'll sit you down on a stool at the back counter of the cozy but comfortable shop and pour you a taste from whatever's open. Then she'll teach you about the major Portuguese wine regions and their very drinkable wines.

Even if vineyard names and their wine varieties are unfamiliar, many of the grapes themselves are readily recognizable. Portuguese-grown pinot noir, chardonnay and syrah are blended with native varieties like tinta pinheira, touriga (also used in port) and rufete.

Portugal's centuries-old wine tradition has been teamed with contemporary techniques that bring the wine into the 21st century.

Now bottles have crisp graphics, and the wines inside them have more pronounced fruit flavors and are more elegant and less earthy than they once were.

Today's Portuguese wines are comparable to many of the best wines in Europe, generally at a fraction of their price. Prices at By The Bottle start at less than $10, with most of the bottles in the $13-to-$25 range. While there are a few higher-priced wines, all the rest are under $40 a bottle.

Cerdeira comes to wine retailing from a career as a theatrical makeup artist, with Broadway shows like "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and "The Lion King" to her credit. She comes to Portuguese wines through her husband, Armando, who owns Quinta Steakhouse in Pearl River.

Everything on that Portuguese restaurant's wine list is available at By The Bottle. The rest of the wines in the store have to pass a rigorous audition conducted by the Cerdeira family.

"We taste everything at home before I'll put it in the store," says Cerdeira. "We won't sell something we won't drink at home or serve to our friends. To get in stock here we have to like the way it tastes."

And the modest size of the shop dictates that they have to be selective, so they've edited down the offerings to about 75 wines in total. The non-Portuguese wines are a mixture of imported (Spain, Italy, Argentina, Chile, Australia and South Africa) and domestic.

The latter are mainly Californias, but they feature one New York wine, a semi-dry Riesling from Hermann J. Weimer, and the evocatively named Ballet of Angels from Connecticut's Sharpe Hill Vineyards. Of note for those who think port when they hear Portugal, By The Bottle sells two interesting white ports, a 10-year-old Andresen and the sweeter La Grima from Barros.

Cerdeira says her shop has gotten a good response both from customers and her business neighbors in downtown Nanuet: "They said, 'Thank God it's not another nail salon.' "

The shop will host a tasting of Portuguese wines accompanied with bread and cheese at 7 p.m. Sept. 10.